Richard Louv on green exercise

What is 'green exercise'?

"preschoolers in a cross-sectional study spent 89% of their days at daycare centers doing sedentary activity... even outdoors, kids spent 56% of their time in sedentary activity."  http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/GeneralPediatrics/12779

With childhood obesity on the rise, we need to build exercise into our children's routines, and no better place than outdoors to get moving!  All we really need to do is provide open outdoor space and the children's creativity will do the rest...  In this interview, Richard Louv, author of "Last Child in the Woods; Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder"  talks about the added benefits of exercising outside.

Here is a transcript of the above video for your convenience:

Q. I've heard the term 'green exercise', what is that?

A. “Green exercise is a term I hope we start hearing more. I believe that phrase is used to some degree in Great Britain. In Great Britain for instance there's the idea of green gyms; green gyms are when it's very much like the family nature club idea, instead of joining that really expensive gym and paying the monthly fee, you get together with other people and you do these nature activities, hiking and gardening and so forth. One of the important things that people need to know about green exercise is that studies are emerging that show that the same amount of energy expanded on a treadmill in an indoor gym; same amount of energy expanded on a hike or some other form of green exercise; the green exercise, people's blood pressure gets better than in an indoor gym even though it's the same amount of energy expanded. There is some value to nature exercise, green exercise, that we don't really fully understand, both psychologically and physically. That's one of the reasons we need to really think a lot more about nature's involvement, for instance, in child obesity. The greatest increase in child obesity in history occurred during the same two decades as the greatest increase in organized sports for children in our history. Soccer is great. But it's not doing the trick, it's not dealing with childhood obesity and now you have pediatricians saying that this generation of children will be the first to have a lower life expectancy than their parents. The word nature did not appear in the literature on child obesity until quite recently. It should have been there long ago.”